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The Gulag Archipelago: From Inferno To Paradiso: Studies in 20th Century Literature
The Gulag Archipelago: From Inferno To Paradiso: Studies in 20th Century Literature
The Gulag Archipelago: From Inferno To Paradiso: Studies in 20th Century Literature
9-1-1982
Recommended Citation
Matual, David (1982) "The Gulag Archipelago: From Inferno to Paradiso," Studies in 20th Century Literature: Vol. 7: Iss. 1, Article 4.
http://dx.doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1113
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The Gulag Archipelago: From Inferno to Paradiso
Abstract
It is apparent from the title of his novel The First Circle and from various details there and in other works that
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is familiar with at least the imagery of Dante's Divine Comedy. One direct and several
indirect references to it also suggest a Dantean subtext in his longest and most ambitious project, The Gulag
Archipelago. Indeed, the loci of the Comedy—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—are transformed in the Gulag
into metaphorical representations of the various stages in the development of man's consciousness—and
especially Solzhenitsyn's consciousness—during the ordeals of arrest, inquest, imprisonment, and exile.
The Inferno is surely the most prominent and in some ways the most memorable part of Solzhenitsyn's work. It
is the phase in which most of the zeks live—the phase of unremitting hatred, cynicism, and selfishness caused
by the cruelty and degradation of their experiences in prisons and labor camps. It is a life among rapacious
thieves and police informers, a life in which only the self matters.
The Purgatorio is the stage reached by those who, like Solzhenitsyn himself, begin to question the validity of all
ideologies and who recognize and admire the strength of those whose personality derives from an
uncompromisingly spiritual worldview. But in the Purgatorio the light of understanding is just beginning to
penetrate the darkness; the process of spiritual rebirth is in an embryonic state.
When a zek crosses the threshold of the Paradiso (as Solzhenitsyn clearly does—notably in Part IV), he attains
a wisdom and understanding not yet accessible to the majority of men. He realizes that attachments to
property, possessions, and even loved ones only add to the sufferings of the prisoners. He now knows that the
life of the spirit, divorced from earthly preoccupations, is the only life that is eternal and inviolate. With that
realization he has achieved the ultimate knowledge and the ultimate happiness.
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Only you who are without flesh are truly, genuinely alive while
all these people only mistakenly consider themselves to be
living. And the abyss between you is unbridgeable. You cannot
shout to them; you cannot cry over them; you cannot shake them
by their shoulders. After all, you are spirit, you are a ghost, and
they are material bodies (II, 583).
NOTES
1. For a discussion of Dantean imagery in The First Circle, see Andrej Kodjak,
Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Boston: Twayne, 1978), pp. 76-79; Vladislav Krasnov,
Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky: A Study in the Polyphonic Novel (Athens, Ga.: Univ.
of Georgia Press, 1980), pp. 105-106.
2. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag Gulag, 3 vols. (Paris: YMCA, 1973-76),
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III, 103. All subsequent references to this edition will be given parenthetically in the
text. All translations from Russian are my own.
3. Writing on a number of Solzhenitsyn's fictional heroes, Leonid Rzhevsky
observes: "All of them are at heart rebellious lovers of truth, defenders of justice,
individuals with a strict measure of conscience toward themselves and their surround-
ings; all of them have endured years of prison camps; all, in one way or another, are
undergoinga kind of catharsis, a reexamination of their former views of life, a rebirth to
another, a higher spirituality." See Creator and Heroic Deed, trans. Sonja Miller
(University, Ala.: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1978), p. 15. Olga Carlisle speaks of a
catharsis in the reader of The Gulag Archipelago. See Solzhenitsyn and the Secret
Circle (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978), pp. 117-18.
4. For an account of the arrests, see Arkhipelag Gulag, Part I, Chapter 1.
5. Evgenii Barabanov speaks of the archipelago as "the road to redemption and
purification." See Zhit' ne po lzhi: sbornik materialov (Moscow: Samizdat; Paris:
YMCA, 1975), p. 54.
6. For more on this theme, see Stephen Carter, The Politics ofSolzhenitsyn (New
York: Holmes & Meier, 1977), p. 46.
7. For a study of the religious and ethical beliefs of Solzhenitsyn and his characters,
see Tat'iana Alekseevna Lopukhina- Rodzianko, Dukhovnye osnovy tvorchestva
Solzhenitsyna (Frankfurt: Posey, 1974).
8. Niels C. Nielson makes the same point: "Solzhenitsyn's Christian faith is to be
explained intellectually from the fact that he had come to feel the need for the steady
presence of a powerful good which would take him through suffering giving perspec-
tive." See Solzhenitsyn's Religion (Nashville, Tenn., and New York: Thomas Nelson,
Inc., 1975), pp. 25-26.
9. Roy Medvedev is contemptuous of Solzhenitsyn's ideas, claiming that they
"smack of utopia" and are not "very original." See Zhit' ne po lzhi, p. 99.
10. Francis Barker rejects Solzhenitsyn's views as "prison mysticism." See
Solzhenitsyn: Politics and Form (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1977), p. 11. He
further remarks: "It is no longer the voice of a realistically limited character who
perceives that, owing to the peculiarities of his unique personal history, he has derived
certain unexpected advantages from prison, but the voice of a seeming omniscience
which has begun to make much larger, mystifying claims for the abstract and unspecific
`prisoner' who is thus canonised" (p. 13).
11. K. Pomerantsev notes the same theme in the fictional works. See "Dobro i zlo u
Solzhenitsyna," Novyi zhurnal, 95 (1969), 150.